


The Ghosts of Whitewall at Midwinter

by menocchio



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Future Fic, Ghosts, M/M, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-14
Updated: 2019-01-14
Packaged: 2019-10-10 01:36:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17416505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/menocchio/pseuds/menocchio
Summary: On the longest night of the year, and the 25th of Charlie's deployment to France, Tommy Shelby is visited by a specter from a different war.





	The Ghosts of Whitewall at Midwinter

He was always meant to die down in the dark earth.

He thinks this every night there is a raid – walking rapidly out of the darkened offices as the sirens shriek, through outer halls lit up by the bombardment on the other side of the windows, down stairs leading to a private tunnel that itself leads to a private shelter – all the frantic, hurried way, he thinks it. _I'm going to die down here._

He can't seem to hold back the thought, and the repetition bothers him almost more than the fear. It smacks of panic. To be afraid is natural; to be panicked is unbearable.

And yet, here he comes stumbling down the shelter tunnel, gasping for breath; here he stops and shudders as a bomb issues somewhere in the streets overhead. The walls tremble, and maybe it's cool, damp brick he is feeling under his palm, not the slick mud under Schwabenhohe, but he can smell the earth, he can hear it and it is hungry.

He makes it twenty more feet before another bomb falls – this one seeming right on top of him. The tunnel lights go out. He drops to his knees, hands over his head, and swears.

It seems more quiet for a while after that.

* * *

Tommy drags himself up to sit against the tunnel wall, knees protesting all the way because he is an old man, despite how very much he has just acted like a little boy. His breath is still coming quick and uneven, and he fumbles for the bottle of gin he brought along. Takes a good dose. Leans back against the filthy bricks and tries to regain some control over his traitorous body.

He doesn't know how long he sits there, backside slowly going numb. Long enough to become aware of the wet seeping through his trousers. Long enough for the bombs to move off to another part of London. Still, he sits. He is tired.

Gradually, dimly, he becomes aware of approaching activity from further down the tunnel. It sounds at first like a distant train, then like regular, human whistling – a mad, spiraling sound.

Tommy tenses, his head turning, weak eyes straining uselessly against darkness. Slowly, he fumbles a hand back against the wall and uses it to lever himself up to his feet. Absently, eyes still squinting off toward the sound, he brushes down his trousers and jacket.

A spot of light emerges from round the next bend, waist-height and swinging. No footsteps accompany the whistling, and something about that is not right. The figure holding the lantern mostly bleeds indecipherable into the shadows, except for the edge of his coat and the large, rough hand holding the lantern.

If the man is surprised to come across another in the tunnel, no change in his movement indicates it. He walks closer until he is standing in front of him and then no more, apparently having arrived at his intended destination.

“Well, who is it?” Tommy says sharply, impatient with the mystery.

“Fucking hell,” comes a thick, amused voice, and Tommy goes still. “I don't know what causes me more vexation, that you've made it to this mature age or that you're still prettier than a showgirl on opening night.”

Tommy reaches for the glasses in his pocket, but no, but no, they are back in his office on his desk. He stares against the glare of the hurricane lantern, but still can't make out more than a tall shadow. Except for the hand holding the lantern. That broad, blunt hand.

Something knocks purposefully against the gin bottle still sitting down by Tommy's feet: a cane. “And what does the Home Office think about this? Isn't there rationing on?” The figure tuts audibly. “Thomas Shelby, are you not doing your part for the war effort?”

The voice is unmistakable. And impossible. But as the figure raises the lantern to dangle it over him, a yellow light throws that old face into relief – the generous mouth lurking in amongst the beard, the piercing eyes, always a shade too intent for comfort.

Tommy lets his head fall back with an audible sound against the walls of the tunnel. So this is it, then, is it. In the final stages of his madness, _this_ is what his mind conjures?

“At least Jacob Marley wore chains,” is all he says, when the first shock has come and gone from his nerves. “Have you come to offer me a chance at redemption?”

“Not like you to underestimate yourself, Tommy. You're well past all that.” Alfie strokes his beard thoughtfully. “I suppose I could give it a try, if you'd like.”

“Oh, whatever you prefer,” says Tommy politely. Because why the fuck not.

Alfie wheels around and paces some, tone going conversational. “So, you're turning a pretty profit these days. Heard about the round up – took care of your Italian problem, maybe once and for all.”

“War has a way of simplifying certain matters.”

He can't look away, but nor can he adjust to having him so close again after so long. He would think he's finally gone mad, but his mind wouldn't be able to summon this level of detail, this electric feeling in the air.

Alfie Solomons always had a distinctly forceful presence, and Tommy had never grown tired of watching him. The man had shoulders that could hold open the locks on Regent's Canal. A pugilist in the guise of a distiller, in the guise of a breadmaker. He was never still, not to his very last moment. And Tommy should know.

“These matters has always been simple.” Alfie turns on his heel and cocks his head. “Let's see. You've unfettered access to of all of London. Damn near royal assent on the black market in all Allied-held territory. How's that feel?”

Tommy, his back still against the damp wall, cold from the concrete snaking its way through to his bones – Tommy just looks at him silently.

Alfie purses his lips. “Yeah. Yeah, my old friend. That's what I fucking thought.”

He shuts his eyes, suddenly weary past all endurance. He rakes his dishevelled hair back from his face. The inside of his eyelids feel patient, attentive. He hears himself say lowly, “My boy's over there, you know.”

“Young Charlie's followed in his old man's footsteps? Now ain't that lovely. Just lovely.” Alfie does not sound like he thinks it's lovely.

He opens his eyes and blinks rapidly to wet them. “He's fighting for his country.”

Some corner of his brain despises himself for the words, that rote phrase. This war has made him become the type of man who parrots slogans from the papers, an MP who roars enthusiastically along in Parliament as if he didn't personally know what kind of hell was out there for the boys.

If Charlie dies, will he talk King and Country over an empty casket?

Alfie steps in very close, staring him down. That old stare. Tommy always figured Alfie's mind had a spot of the infinite in it and thus occasionally found trouble when forced to go to ground. Would strike like a bolt of lightning, leave you burned in the aftermath.

“If a man wants a hand in forging a better future, he goes,” says Alfie. “But no man ever come back worthy of anything but the same old muckpit. That's the fucking riddle we both lived.”

“Charlie's different,” Tommy says. He gives neither inch nor inkling that the other man's proximity bothers him. “He believes in things – ideas, rather. He's never seen the utility of the improved Shelby name unless he could put it to some good use. He's so much like his mother,” he ends with, quiet and mostly to himself. It's an old thought, worn comfortable around the edges.

“But he's gone to war like his father.”

“They all have, Alfie. Not much choice in it – you don't know what's happened. What's it been like.”

“'It's looking like rain' the Gypsy says to the Jew. Do you know the fucking punchline, Thomas?”

“Wasn't that it?” he asks coolly.

Alfie reaches out and cups his face, easy as you please. His palm is as calloused as it was when he was alive, and feels just as warm.

Alfie doesn't blink, and Tommy doesn't flinch. He can hardly stand the fucking nostalgia of it all.

“If you're an apparition,” he says slowly after a long moment has passed, “then how is it we can touch?”

Alfie smiles quick. He looks, abruptly, a little sheepish.

“Ah, you got me, mate.” He takes his hand away and runs it down his beard. He says with an abrupt change in tone, “Look, there ain't no way to put this nice, so I'm just gonna tell you: you bought it.”

Tommy doesn't move. “Alfie,” he says, warning.

The other man lifts his lantern wide to his right. “Yeah. Half an hour ago, or thereabouts.”

In the swing of the light, Tommy sees a body slumped down against the wall not less than ten feet away. Well-dressed, good shoes. The man's face is turned away, but he recognizes the angled profile from the shaving mirror. He's never seen it quite so obviously dead before, though.

“So what did it?” he asks eventually, looking back at Alfie, who's been glancing furtively at him in the meantime, like he is maybe expecting Tommy to throw a fit or have some sort of pitiful emotional display. “Was it my heart?”

Tommy has been close enough to this moment so many times over the years, it is strange to finally be here for real. He feels curiously unaffected. He does find himself hoping it was thirty-five years of drinking and opium, and not the old nerves finally giving up.

“It was fright, actually.” Alfie nods to himself and gestures at the body with his cane. “Hard to see in this light, but you actually pissed yourself. One too many night raids, and I guess you just couldn't handle the unholy stress of it all.”

Tommy stares at him, blinking slowly. Alfie gives another good hard stare back but this time only holds it for about ten seconds before he breaks off with a laugh. “Yeah, all right then. How the fuck am I supposed to know what killed you?”

He feels his lips thin. “Why are you here?”

“Well, you died alone, didn't you? Always thought you would,” he adds, ruminative. “Family man though you claim to be. Anyway, so what I figured was, I'd come down here and wait it out with you, so you wouldn't – wouldn't be, well. Alone.”

His eyes are on Tommy again, amusement gone and something like regret softening the gaze. But soft with Alfie is a lie, or at the very most, a half-truth.

Tommy can't take it any longer; he reaches for a cigarette. He still has cigarettes somehow and spares a questioning thought over the strength of ghost tobacco. His hand, he notices sourly as he lights up, has begun trembling slightly.

“And why?” comes out through his pinched lips.

“Why'd you die? Way of the world, Tommy. A man is born of a woman – or however it goes in yon muddy field of caravans, I don't judge – anyway, a man is born, he fucks around a bit, and then he fucks off. That's how it works. Broadly speaking.”

Tommy won't be distracted. “Why would you do that? Wait with me, I mean.” And wait for what, he doesn't ask. His match hand is still trembling, and he clenches it tightly into a fist at his side.

“You were there for me when I died.”

Tommy blows out a thick stream of smoke in irritation. “Alfie, I was the one who shot you.”

Alfie looks away. “Mind like a steel trap, this boy. No detail forgotten.”

He doesn't point out to the other man that he is at least a decade older than him, than he'd ever gotten to _be_. Tommy is instead distracted, suddenly aware that something very strange is happening to his body. To him. He smokes harder, but it doesn't do anything to alleviate the sensation. He blinks down at himself, half-expecting to see his limbs starting to fade away, but they look regular enough. Nothing visible explains this sudden unmooring, this sick, floaty feeling.

“What's happening? Is this part of it?” comes out in a rasp more desperate than he'd like to admit.

Alfie comes close again and puts his broad hand on Tommy's heaving chest, palm right over his heart. He leans in, a slight pressure on the ribcage. The weight serves as an anchor, and Tommy presses against it instinctively.

“I believe,” Alfie murmurs into the close space between their faces. “That you're panicking, mate. Don't do that,” he adds as an afterthought.

“Alfie,” he gasps with difficulty, “Don't – you fucking tell me – ”

A rough hand curls around the base of his skull, thumb at the hinge of his jaw, pressing him to turn his head and then Alfie is kissing him. It clears all thoughts straight from his head.

Absurdly, this is what makes the grief well up at full raging power. Alfie is a heavy figure, amorously speaking. He is edged with rough textures and tastes of rum. He makes Tommy acutely aware of his own body in a way he hasn't been for years, outside of muscle aches and absentminded arousal. The kiss is a reminder, a beckoning of life, but he is now dead. Grief is a selfish emotion at its heart, and it comes for him like this:

He feels, he fucking feels, is he going to stop feeling?

* * *

The oil in Alfie's lantern is burning low when Alfie moves back a few inches, his brow furrowed. He looks Tommy over with a critical eye like he's back in Camden Town inspecting a batch. Whatever he sees must leave him satisfied, because he moves back a few inches more.

Tommy watches all this silently.

They don't talk about the kiss, but that isn't so strange. There had been so much, back then, that they never spoke about.

The light gutters and, in the shifting shadows playing over Alfie's face, Tommy sees ruination. From man to skull and back again in that warm light. His old friend is no more than a specter but Tommy cannot be afraid of him.

Alfie glances down at the lantern. “Sorry, mate. Fuel's low.”

“'S all right, Alfie. I don't mind.”

“Won't be long now.”

Tommy doesn't utter the words, can't ask _will you stay with me._ Perhaps he doesn't need to; half of all the things he's ever said to Alfie were never actually said aloud.

The two of them have carried out entire arguments and conversations in the alert space between their gazes, sometimes in tandem with whatever prattling nonsense Alfie was expounding upon for the dubious pleasure of the more unaware bystanders in the room. The number of times friends and family turned to Tommy, gazes baffled and pleading, as Alfie stirred the fucking pot, while all the while the two of them were carrying on a second silent conversation –

“Do you know,” he says quietly into the dimming pool of light, “despite you betraying me – over and over again – ” at this, Alfie hums and nods attentively, “I think I'm glad it was you. Here, I mean.” He looks at him directly. “I am glad, Alfie.”

The man's expression is very serious, his eyes dark and unblinking.

Tommy sucks in a breath and carefully leans back against the wall of the tunnel. Wordless, the other man follows his lead. Soon they are shoulder-to-shoulder, like the soldiers they never really stopped being, the soldiers they have always been with each other, even when no one else could see it.

It used to astonish Tommy, how no one else could see it. It was right there. All you had to do was take one good look.

“That's it, Tommy. Back against the wall, just like old times.” Alfie is whispering. Why is he whispering?

“We were friends, weren't we.”

“The truest,” agrees Alfie.

“Somehow I still... feel that. Even after everything. But I've never understood why.”

“It was a singular thing.”

“I was so angry with you.” Now he is whispering too. It feels right with the encroaching shadows.

Alfie says, “I know,” but doesn't sound remotely apologetic. And that's fine, that's just Alfie.

“But I was most angry at you for dying. For making me be the one to put you down.”

“Wish I could tell you sorry for that, but I won't lie to you. Not now.”

“I know. It's all right,” because maybe it is, finally. There is just this last thing: “It was hard to continue after that, though. Felt like an impossible task, some days. Too great an effort, a poor return on investment. I think, if it hadn't been for Charlie, I'd – ” He doesn't say it. Even now, the thought terrifies him. There's only ever been one thing that really terrified Tommy Shelby.

Alfie reaches out again, signalling clearly with his hand as he places it along the far side of Tommy's face. Tommy half expects another kiss – perhaps even wants one, with a unfamiliar impish impulse to kiss back – but what he gets is an almost familial kiss on the cheek.

Alfie leaves his mouth close and speaks quickly, the words pouring out of him in a torrent – familiar in rate, new in content.

“First time I saw you, Tommy, it was like you woke something in me. Burned like a chlorine gas attack, but it did the job. I realized – really realized, you have to understand, I'd been the fucking walking dead since the war was over, and then here comes this beautiful little fucker talking nonsense about anarchist schoolboys and threatening to blow up my fucking bakery with himself inside, and I'm thinking, this man, he's got ice in his veins.”

Tommy turns his head slightly so he can meet the other's gaze. Alfie breathes out a little smile.

“But that was wrong, all wrong, innit, because it's not ice that drives a man to pull gambles like that one – should've chased you down in the street and put a bullet in you, I should have – ”

“We'd already agreed,” Tommy puts in.

“Yeah, yeah, we'd already agreed. And besides, I liked you.”

Now Tommy feels himself smile faintly. “I knew you liked me. And I knew you'd still put that bullet in me, given the chance.”

Alfie grows more animated, and the old hand gestures come into play. He taps lightly Tommy's forehead with the cane. “See, it's this level of understanding, this grand fucking meeting of minds, that I am _talking_ about, Tommy. It don't come around every day.”

“If I didn't just die, Alfie, I'd say you were proposing to me.”

“Time enough for all that, you'll see.”

Tommy sobers again. “Will I?”

There are so many people he's lost and somehow gone staggering on like he wasn't leaking out slowly from the wounds of them all. He thinks about asking if he'll get to see them all again – John and Arthur. Freddie. Grace.

God, _Grace_.

He doesn't ask. Maybe he is fearful of the answer – maybe he is allowed to be fucking fearful of it. He can bear many things, but he isn't sure he can bear this final disappointment.

He reaches into his pocket with hands he can no longer quite feel and draws out another cigarette. He lights it and watches the smoke curl sideways towards the entrance of the air raid shelter.

The lantern flame gutters silently. The darkness flickers in large swathes over the brickwork of the tunnel.

Tommy can no longer feel any part of his body, not really. It has become an object defined by relativity, and right now the only thing seemingly related to it is the man standing beside him, somehow warm and large. Shoulders that could hold open the locks on Regent's Canal.

“Tommy?”

“Yes?”

“I'm sorry I made you shoot me.”

“Alfie,” he says just as the flame inside the glass winks out, “If I had to, I'd do it again.”

**Author's Note:**

> Do you know, this didn't turn out _nearly_ as depressing as I thought it would? There was a while in the middle of writing this, after I'd realized that Tommy had to be actually dead, that it was looking pretty g r i m.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
